Pondering about mana bar change...

Has anyone else ever wondered what the point of increasing the mana bar was?

I mean, considering that everything else mana related will scale with it, was there ever even a point to it in the first place?

The only reason I can think of is the Intelligence changes, but that isn't even demanding of changing the mana base from 20 to 100, just divide current Intelligence numbers by 5 and you get the same results. It just seems completely useless and makes things more complicated for mana stats.

 

The original point was so that way individual skill points actually reduced spell costs instead of just at a few specific intervals. That way items and spells could be more finely tuned in terms of mana and also less finicky in terms of rounding and RNG.

 

That would actually make a good amount of sense ngl, but yknow...

 

Currently, water items are balanced around spells being spammable. I just hope that it stays that way in 2.0.

 

I think the main reasons they changed the mana system is because you can lower spell costs with ability points.

Another reason I can think of is that it makes the spell cost % id more accurate

 

higher flexibility in items and skills (can reflect different cost more precisely)

 

LMAOO YOU FORUM SIGNATURE

 

I'm surprised a lot of people are looking forward to it, I've personally been hoping the change wasn't going to happen since we were informed of it. It might make intelligence's skill effect a bit more consistent, but I've always found the intelligence "tiers" to be extremely useful for building and the intelligence effect change would still have major tiers if it wasn't for mana now using decimals to calculate as well; and the larger mana & spell cost numbers IMO are both much more difficult to build with and a headache for balancing. Spell cost % will be harder to calculate, every mana & raw spell cost roll with be harsher, positive spell costs will be even more impossible to actually have as a downside on an item, intelligence is disproportionately weak to even current IDs, and the convenient base 1 mana/spell cost that would always make an item decent is gone too.

It's not a bad change per se but it's essentially sacrificing quite a bit of utility and convenience for looking a bit more satisfying which IMO is simply not worth it.

 

well
on the one hand I hate building with intelligence and this'll make it worse
and on the other hand it'll make mana regen more complicated
and on the other other hand (it's a severed hand which I bought on eBay) intelligence might become necessary in building spell builds and so I'll be in pain

 

I hadn't even thought of how aids it would be to balance LOL

________________________________

good take tbh.

 

I thought the majority consensus was that intelligence was too OP rn?

 

I think its better for new players since they won't have wyntils telling them when the next intelligence "tier" will give them a reduction of spell. This is a big change tho so yah it probably is alot harder to balance. I think multiplying everything by 5 mana related will get it in the general spot you want it at and you can change things as the beta goes by.

 

another benefit i'm looking forward to is mana steal triggering with every hit - it wouldn't be possible in the 20 mana system because it's not granular enough to give small enough amounts of mana with each hit

the spell cost stuff is definitely unfortunate - it could probably be avoided if the ID roll system wasn't so rigid but i guess that's not changing anytime soon

 

Yes, current int is ridiculous in a vacuum sense (basically a multiplier to how many spells you can cast), but future (2.0) int is super duper weak from the info we have

 

By that same metric, defense and agility shouldn't exist anywhere close to how they do now. And there's now a specific EHP section in the player stats- I don't think it would be a far reach by any means to have spell costs exist in the same way on the player info. Not that I necessarily think that intelligence tiers are that player-friendly, mind you, but I feel as though they are a necessary evil for making classbuilding not one giant cluster headache for which build tools will essentially be required.

The 100 mana system is not granular enough either, there are now also invisible decimals ensuring that these sorts of things work properly.

It was for several years, but ever since the introduction of spell cost IDs intelligence hasn't really been overpowered- arguably even underpowered, with investing more than 105 intelligence happening rarely and more recently with the (ab?)use of items like Demon Tide you even see much lower intelligence investment in meta spell builds, not to mention the brutally powerful builds with Brainwash that didn't even begin to think about investing in intelligence. Of course, certain parts of the spell cost stuff wasn't terribly well fleshed out like the total lack of damage within TFA builds with decent mana or spell costs, or the impossible to balance Grookwarts accessories, but I think it is at a point where we legitimately would want to buff spell options within solo intelligence.

And even aside from that, I don't see a huge problem with having intelligence be the "main" thing for spell builds- the bare requirements for item design dictates mana & spell related IDs to be first and foremost for intelligence-related items, and with the skill point effects being split into "damage-consistent, damage-chance, defense-consistent, defense-chance" with the fifth one being entirely separate dictating anything related to spells- yeah, that element would be the primary element tied to spell. The extent of which it is then required for spell builds was awkward for years, but when spell cost IDs were introduced that was effectively solved from a design standpoint- if we did end up using spell costs well enough in various items to actually succeed in that goal is questionable, but with them just existing you can reasonably assume that there would eventually be a healthy balance.

edit: i later realized i start rambling after this. definitely feel free to read this as it's some of my biggest concerns about 2.0 & i'd like for others to ask their own questions, but it's not relevant to your question lol

Then with these mana & intelligence changes that are going to happen in update 2.0, a totally different approach is used. First and foremost, I'm not quite sure which came first, but with maximum mana going from 20 to 100 intelligence's highest skill point effect numbers would be increasingly more powerful, similar to how defense and agility's skill point effect, although with much lower numbers to start off with (30-40ish compared to tens of thousands) to not quite as extreme results. Still, either to counter this or simply the easiest way the following change would be made, intelligence was nerfed to affect maximum mana instead of base spell mana cost- to show that in numbers, instead of reducing an average spell by like 75% at high int making it 4 times as useful it instead gave you 75% more mana which is about, well, 1.75 times as useful. Also, not to forget, that with max mana increasing your natural mana regen also increases, as that's always 5% of your max mana every second (this wasn't explicitly mentioned in the changelog, but that is how natural mana regen already current works and it will simply adjust along).

The biggest (not the only one, but I can be annoyed at other things while this makes me worried) problem then results from the very core of Wynns gameplay: spamming spells. No cooldowns, no turns to wait, just using spells, everything we love. This means that players go through mana very quickly relative to the total amount they have, and as a result that increasing your maximum mana by at most 80%.. doesn't go over very well for usefulness. In fact, if you have a single of any spell cost in a spell you'd cycle, it's probably going to be just as useful as like 5-10+% of intelligence's increase in max mana. Mind you, that's pretty much the difference between 100 int and 150 int. Basically, that part of the new skill point effect of intelligence is as good as useless for any remotely serious fights at the second half of the game.

The for some reason much less focused on 'other' new intelligence effect, the subsequent increase of natural mana regen, however, doesn't redeem the nearly irrelevant higher max mana. If the standard base for it is 5 mana per second at 100 max mana, you can quantify that as being equal to 25 mana regen (mana timers don't make a real difference anymore, if you've seen the stream mana now regenerates several times a second for an always constant flow of mana). Once again, at the maximum intelligence that makes for an extra 80%- so equivalent an extra 20 mana regen.

20 mana regen. Mind you, that's in new values. Comparing it to the current live numbers, that'd be 4 mana regen: the entirety of intelligence's options distilled in something worth about as much as a level 40 rare leggings.

Of course, that is just intelligence as a stat in a void, and there is obviously the pre-existing spell focus on intelligence-related items to help prop it up a bit, but overall I struggle with seeing any way this ends up even somewhat balanced without practically reworking all spell cost and mana ID locations and values in the item pool, as how it currently stands, I find intelligence to be unable to carry its own weight in 2.0 with any less than major reworks, let alone be up to the task of being more valuable than defensive or offensive skill points.

 

Well you will always see some difference in defense and agil as every skill point does help while mana has these weird tiers so I dont think they are the same. We will see how yall handle tho i guess so good luck

 

this bart quote goes so hard.
thanks for explaining the issue in detail btw, i didnt really comprehend how fucked it was until you explained it text-wall style (not sarcasm)

 

It seems to me then that Salted was trying to eliminate spell spam in exchange for having more powerful spells.

 

I think there are still things like mana bank that let you do this, but I probably would prefer it this way as right now 99% of the best builds are spell spam (or tierstack)

I’d love to see the return of heavy melee or heavy spell, those are always fun but kind of useless. Also with the mana steal changes we shouldn’t need to be at a super slow attack speed now, meaning a revival of hybrid builds?

 

also why do i feel like mana regen is increased every 25 int
25 int makes u regen 2 instead of 1
50 int is 3 instead of 2